Beeb 2.0

Auntie Beeb, to the ex-Colonial types is going in for a nip-and-tuck. Forgetting that reason people love BBC for its content, and not gimmicky tricks, the company is hoping to build a public service version of MySpace.com, reports Media Guardian. Its betting the farm on user generated content – blogs, videos and what not. Something tells me, this is going to get a lot of attention. I just simply want a damn good, and reliable news source, which BBC used to me, before it got the “forgetting-your-core-competency” disease. For UGC, Newsvine is pretty darn good.

I am surprised that no-one here has mentioned that the BBC is using public money, taken from taxpayers by force, to compete in the private arena. Even if you do not watch the BBC, if you do not pay your BBC licence fee you will go to jail.

This move by the BBC will further stifle competition in the media space in the UK.

Stewart, the fact that they’ve been doing it for 80 years means that it probably needs to be re-evaluated!
The point I was making is that there are now many different ways to ‘broadcast’ content to the licence payers. Is the charter of the BBC to have BBC 1, and BBC 2 etc on the public airwaves or is it to produce quality content relevant to the British public? They are not mutually exclusive, but there is no dependency any more (tending towards zero anyway). If we choose to watch BBC programs over broadband, does it make any difference to the BBC charter? If the reason to have the broadcast network is to provide access to information, then should the BBC have a broadband network as well? Should we get broadband access for our licence fee?

the first time i read the article at media.guardian i had a heart attack…finally a brick and mortar company that understands the meaning of “2.0”

BUT, after reading it again i have to say i am disappointed…Stuart, if you read the article closely you’ll notice there is a reason why it’s being branded as a “public version of myspace,”

Highfield says, “‘create your own space and to build bbc.co.uk around you’, encouraging them to launch their own blogs and post home videos on the site”

you would think a company like the BBC would realize their competitive advantage is their existing content…rather than hoping users post videos and host blogs, they should be encouraging users to create content around BBC’s content versus creating their own little BBC…it may seem like the difference between the two is trivial, but it’s actually quite different

I wish they would plough all the old decaying content they already have form the VAST archive – which we all in the UK paid for – into some tagged silos and structure.

They stuff they have released to far in the Creative Archive project does not even touch the quantity of content sat in warehouses which still needs to be bagged, coded, tagged and uploaded before it rots away forever.

I read their summary from the various directors reports into divisions of the company. I’m not even going to try and post a link through your anti-spam filter, but follow the link on James Enck’s Chaotica.
I certainly did NOT get the impression that they were going to do a public MySpace.
There was a lot of variation in the recommendations and a very obvious difference between those heads who saw the Web as the future and those who could not break away from the old model. E.g. recommendation to put more popular comedy on BBC 1 rather than BBC 2 – like centralised scheduling has ANY relevance in the future?! (Think BBC Me)
In the end though, the summary was pretty good; Prioritise tagging and labelling of their content and allow people to access it, plus develop a pan BBC rights strategy (though that scares me a bit), build a more powerful search engine.
Short term goals and nothing too fanciful.
Given the Beeb’s current preference for RealPlayer, I feel they could make a big mistake on the DRM issue – let’s see what happens!
I also think there’s a bigger question to be answered in the UK, which is ‘what is the BBC?’. As a publicly funded organisation, it needs to decide between distribution and content production. If it’s about distribution, then it becomes an NGN and Britain will have free broadband access nationally. That is unlikely, which means it is a content producer and aggregator. As such, it has to give a lot more public access to produce content, but the same as MySpace? Not unless MySpace becomes a very different animal…

I think it’s a great move – very forward looking. I hope they can pull it off. The phrasing is unfortunate and cheap (“public version of MySpace”), but if it’s about making content vibrant and interactive, I’m all for it. The BBC is embracing its audience, rather than forcing them to be passive consumers of content. It’s all about the conversation, right?

Not only are they a news source though, their remit is, and quite rightly so, much wider than that. In their own words ‘Audiences are at the heart of everything we do’, which would seem to knit nicely with UGC. They also say ‘Creativity is the lifeblood of our organisation’, so innovation and diversification certainly isn’t outside of its field of vision.

Being in the UK, I guess my view of the BBC is a different one, but to the people here the BBC has not ‘one-core-competency’, as you put it, but a set of roles it is charged with performing, only one of which is being the best news organisation in the world – still.